Journal:Security architecture and protocol for trust verifications regarding the integrity of files stored in cloud services

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Full article title Security architecture and protocol for trust verifications regarding the integrity of files stored in cloud services
Journal Sensors
Author(s) Pinheiro, Alexandre; Canedo, Edna Dias; De Sousa Junior, Rafael Timoteo;,
De Oliveira Albuquerque, Robson; Villalba, Luis Javier Garcia; Kim, Tai-Hoon
Author affiliation(s) University of Brasília, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Sungshin Women’s University
Primary contact Email: javiergv at fdi dot ucm dot es
Year published 2018
Volume and issue 18(3)
Page(s) 753
DOI 10.3390/s18030753
ISSN 1999-5903
Distribution license Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
Website https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/18/3/753/htm
Download https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/18/3/753/pdf (PDF)

Abstract

Cloud computing is considered an interesting paradigm due to its scalability, availability, and virtually unlimited storage capacity. However, it is challenging to organize a cloud storage service (CSS) that is safe from the client point-of-view and to implement this CSS in public clouds since it is not advisable to blindly consider this configuration as fully trustworthy. Ideally, owners of large amounts of data should trust their data to be in the cloud for a long period of time, without the burden of keeping copies of the original data, nor of accessing the whole content for verification regarding data preservation. Due to these requirements, integrity, availability, privacy, and trust are still challenging issues for the adoption of cloud storage services, especially when losing or leaking information can bring significant damage, be it legal or business-related. With such concerns in mind, this paper proposes an architecture for periodically monitoring both the information stored in the cloud and the service provider behavior. The architecture operates with a proposed protocol based on trust and encryption concepts to ensure cloud data integrity without compromising confidentiality and without overloading storage services. Extensive tests and simulations of the proposed architecture and protocol validate their functional behavior and performance.

Keywords: cloud computing; cloud data storage; proof of integrity; services monitoring; trust

Introduction

Companies, institutions, and government agencies generate large amounts of digital information every day, such as documents, projects, and transaction records. For legal or business reasons, this information needs to remain stored for long periods of time.

Due to the popularization of cloud computing (CC), its cost reduction, and an ever-growing supply of cloud storage services (CSS), many companies are choosing these services to store their sensitive information. Cloud computing’s advantages include scalability, availability, and virtually unlimited storage capacity. However, it is a challenge to build safe storage services, mainly when these services run in public cloud infrastructures and are managed by service providers under conditions that are not fully trustworthy.

Data owners often need to keep their stored data for a long time, though it is possible that they rarely will have to access it. Furthermore, some data could be stored in a CSS without its owner having to keep the original copy. However, in these situations, the storage service reliability must be considered, because even the best services sometimes fail[1], and since the loss of these data or their leakage can bring significant business or legal damage, the issues of integrity, availability, privacy, and trust need to be answered before the adoption of the CSS.

Data integrity is defined as the accuracy and consistency of stored data. These two properties indicate that the data have not changed and have not been broken.[2] Moreover, besides data integrity, a considerable number of organizations consider both confidentiality and privacy requirements as the main obstacles to the acceptance of public cloud services.[2] Hence, to fulfill these requirements, a CSS should provide mechanisms to confirm data integrity, while still ensuring user privacy and data confidentiality.

Considering these requirements, this paper proposes an architecture for periodically monitoring both the information stored in the cloud infrastructure and the contracted storage service behavior. The architecture is based on the operation of a proposed protocol that uses a third party and applies trust and encryption means to verify both the existence and the integrity of data stored in the cloud infrastructure without compromising these data’s confidentiality. Furthermore, the protocol was designed to minimize the overload that it imposes on the cloud storage service.

To validate the proposed architecture and its supporting protocol, a corresponding prototype was developed and implemented. Then, this prototype was submitted to testing and simulations by means of which we verified its functional characteristics and its performance.

This paper addresses all of this and is structured as follows. The "Background" section reviews the concepts and definitions of cloud computing, encryption, and trust, then we present works related to data integrity in the cloud. Then we describe the proposed architecture, while its implementation is discussed in the following section. Afterwards, the "Experimental validation" section is devoted to the experiments and respective results, while the main differences between related works and the proposed architecture follow it. The paper ends with our conclusions and outlines future works.

Background

Cloud computing (CC) is a model that allows convenient and on-demand network access to a shared set of configurable computational resources. These resources can be quickly provisioned with minimal management effort and without the service provider’s intervention.[3] Since it constitutes a flexible and reliable computing environment, CC is being gradually adopted in different business scenarios using several available supporting solutions.

Relying on different technologies (e.g., virtualization, utility computing, grid computing, and service-oriented architecture) and proposing a new computational services paradigm, CC requires high-level management activities, which include: (a) selection of the service provider, (b) selection of virtualization technology, (c) virtual resources’ allocation, and (d) monitoring and auditing procedures to comply with service level agreements (SLAs).[4]

A particular CC solution comprises several components such as client modules, data centers, and distributed servers. These elements form the three parts of the cloud solution[4][5], each one with a specific purpose and specific role in delivering working applications based on the cloud.

The CC architecture is basically structured into two main layers: a lower and a higher resource layer, each one dealing with a particular aspect of making application resources available. The lower layer comprises the physical infrastructure, and it is responsible for the virtualization of storage and computational resources. The higher layer provides specific services, such as software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and infrastructure as a service (IaaS). Each of these layers may have its own management and monitoring systems, independent of one another, thus improving flexibility, reuse, and scalability.[6][7]

Since CC provides access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources, its provisioning mode can be classified by the intended access methods and coverage of services’ availability, which yields different models of CC services’ deployment, ranging from private clouds, in which resources are shared within an owner organization, to public clouds, in which cloud providers possess the resources that are consumed by other organizations based on contracts, but also including hybrid cloud environments and community clouds.[8]

The central concept of this paper’s proposal is the verification by the cloud service user that a particular property, in our case the integrity of files, is fulfilled by the cloud service provider, regardless of the mode of a service's provision and deployment, either in the form of private, public, or hybrid clouds.

The verification of file integrity is performed by means of a protocol that uses contemporaneous computational encryption, specifically public key encryption and hashes, which together provide authentication of messages and compact integrity verification sequences that are unequivocally bound to each verified file (signed file hashes).

This proposed protocol is conceived to allow the user of cloud services to check whether the services provider is indeed acting as expected in regard to maintaining the integrity of the user files, which corresponds to the idea of the user monitoring the provider to acquire and maintain trust in the provider behavior in this circumstance.

Some specific aspects of trust, encryption, and hashes that are considered as useful for this paper’s comprehension are briefly reviewed in the subsections below.

Trust

Trust is a common reasoning process for humans to face the world’s complexities and to think sensibly about everyday life possibilities. Trust is strongly linked to expectations about something, which implies a degree of uncertainty and optimism. It is the choice of putting something in another’s hands, considering the other’s behavior to determine how to act in a given situation.[9]

Trust can be considered as a particular level of subjective probability in which an agent believes that another agent will perform a certain action, which is subject to monitoring.[10] Furthermore, trust can be represented as an opinion so that situations involving trust and trust relationships can be modeled. Thus, positive and negative feedback on a specific entity can be accumulated and used to calculate its future behavior.[11] This opinion may result from direct experience or may come from a recommendation from another entity.[12]

According to Adnane et al.[13] and De Sousa, Jr. and Puttini[14], trust, trust models, and trust management have been the subject of various research works demonstrating that the conceptualization of computational trust allows a computing entity to reason with and about trust, and to make decisions regarding other entities. Indeed, since the initial works on the subject by the likes of Marsh[9] and Yahalom et al.[15], computational trust is recognized as an important aspect for decision-making in distributed and auto-organized applications, and its expression allows formalizing and clarifying trust aspects in communication protocols.

References

  1. ↑ Tandel, S.T.; Shah, V.K.; Hiranwal, S. (2013). "An implementation of effective XML based dynamic data integrity audit service in cloud". International Journal of Societal Applications of Computer Science 2 (8): 449–553. https://web.archive.org/web/20150118081656/http://ijsacs.org/previous.html. 
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 Dabas, P.; Wadhwa, D. (2014). "A Recapitulation of Data Auditing Approaches for Cloud Data". International Journal of Computer Applications Technology and Research 3 (6): 329–32. doi:10.7753/IJCATR0306.1002. https://ijcat.com/archieve/volume3/issue6/ijcatr03061002. 
  3. ↑ Mell, P.; Grance, T. (September 2011). "The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing". Computer Security Resource Center. https://csrc.nist.gov/publications/detail/sp/800-145/final. 
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 Miller, M. (2008). Cloud Computing: Web-Based Applications That Change the Way You Work and Collaborate Online. Que Publishing. ISBN 9780789738035. 
  5. ↑ Velte, T.; Velte, A.; Elsenpeter, R.C. (2009). Cloud Computing: A Practical Approach. McGraw-Hill Education. ISBN 9780071626941. 
  6. ↑ Zhou, M.; Zhang, R.; Zeng, D.; Qian, W. (2010). "Services in the Cloud Computing era: A survey". Proceedings from the 4th International Universal Communication Symposium: 40–46. doi:10.1109/IUCS.2010.5666772. 
  7. ↑ Jing, X.; Jian-Jun, Z. (2010). "A Brief Survey on the Security Model of Cloud Computing". Proceedings from the Ninth International Symposium on Distributed Computing and Applications to Business, Engineering and Science: 475–8. doi:10.1109/DCABES.2010.103. 
  8. ↑ Mell, P.; Grance, T. (October 2009). "The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing" (PDF). https://www.nist.gov/sites/default/files/documents/itl/cloud/cloud-def-v15.pdf. 
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 Marsh, S.P. (April 1994). "Formalising Trust as a Computational Concept" (PDF). University of Stirling. http://stephenmarsh.wdfiles.com/local--files/start/TrustThesis.pdf. 
  10. ↑ Gambetta, D. (1990). "Can We Trust Trust?". In Gambetta, D. (PDF). Trust: Making and Breaking Cooperative Relations (2008 Scanned Digital Copy). ISBN 0631155066. https://www.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/media/1779/gambetta-trust_making-and-breaking-cooperative-relations.pdf. 
  11. ↑ Jøsang, A.; Knapskog, S.J. (2011). "A Metric for Trusted Systems" (PDF). Proceedings from the 21st National Information Systems Security Conference. https://csrc.nist.gov/csrc/media/publications/conference-paper/1998/10/08/proceedings-of-the-21st-nissc-1998/documents/papera2.pdf. 
  12. ↑ Victor, P.; De Cock, M.; Cornelis, C. (2011). "Trust and Recommendations". In Ricci, F.; Rokach, L.; Shapira, B.; Kantor, P.B.. Recommender Systems Handbook. Springer. pp. 645–75. ISBN 9780387858197. 
  13. ↑ Adnane, A.; Bidan, C.; de Sousa Júnior, R.T. (2013). "Trust-based security for the OLSR routing protocol". Computer Communications 36 (10–11): 1159-71. doi:10.1016/j.comcom.2013.04.003. 
  14. ↑ De Sousa Jr., R.T.; Puttini, R.S. (2010). "Trust Management in Ad Hoc Networks". In Yan, Z.. Trust Modeling and Management in Digital Environments: From Social Concept to System Development. IGI Global. pp. 224–49. ISBN 9781615206827. 
  15. ↑ Yahalom, R.; Klein, B.; Beth, T. (1993). "Trust relationships in secure systems-a distributed authentication perspective". Proceedings from the 1993 IEEE Computer Society Symposium on Research in Security and Privacy: 150–64. doi:10.1109/RISP.1993.287635. 

Notes

This presentation is faithful to the original, with only a few minor changes to presentation, grammar, and punctuation. In some cases important information was missing from the references, and that information was added.

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